Forest Fringe at TPAM

Photo: Briony Campbell

Andy Field (Co-founder of Forest Fringe)
Andy Field is an artist, writer, part-time curator, sometime academic and very occasional performer who lives in Bristol in the UK but works all over the place. He is interested in adventurous and unusual work whether it calls itself theatre, live art, performance, installation, sound art or anything else. His own work is diverse, slipping between disciplines as a means of exploring a preoccupation with cities, everyday performance, trashy films, radical politics and what it feels like to be around at this strange moment in time. He is also Co-Director of Forest Fringe with Deborah Pearson. Forest Fringe is an artist-led organisation whose innovative community-led approach to supporting and collaborating with artists has allowed it to become a home to some of the country’s most exciting and radical new performance work.

Ant Hampton “OK OK”
Ant Hampton founded Rotozaza in 1998, a project which explored the use of instructions given to unrehearsed ‘guest’ performers, both on stage and, subsequently, within more intimate structures sustained and played out by the audience themselves. The Autoteatro project continues via collaborations with artists including Gert-Jan Stam, Glen Neath, Tim Etchells, Britt Hatzius and Jessica Huber. OK OK is a work by Ant Hampton in collaboration with Gert Jan Stam. It is a minimalist comedy performed by the audience themselves: four seated participants simply read, out loud, the words hi-lighted on the scripts they hold. The text seems to anticipate the readers’ thoughts at any given moment: the doubt, curiosity and anxiety that could be expected of anyone asked to read out loud, in a group, without preparation. The result is an often very funny sense of the script acting as an uncannily ‘live’ object; a text, perhaps, being written at the same time as being read.
*Performed by the audience themselves in English or Japanese

Brian Lobel “Carpe Minuta Prima”
Brian Lobel creates performances about bodies and how they are watched, policed, poked, prodded, and loved by others. The New York-born, London-based Lobel has shown work internationally in a range of contexts, from medical schools to galleries, cabarets to museums, marketplaces to forests, blending provocative humour with insightful reflection. For Carpe Minuta Prima, Brian Lobel adds a devilish twist to the age-old question “Can I have a minute of your time?” In Yokohama women offer passersby 100 Yen, in exchange for 1 minute of their life. After 60 minutes from Yokohama are bought, and signed over to Brian Lobel for ownership, all minutes are then sold on to others for the price of 100 Yen. Carpe Minuta Prima (meaning Seize the Minute) playfully explores themes of economy, the value of our time and our work, the over-documenting of our lives and what it means to sign away your soul.
*Special Performance with Yoko Ishiguro and Eiji Takeda (Shigeki Nakano + Frankens) held

Tim Etchells “Give Up On Your Dreams”
Tim Etchells (1962) is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between performance, visual art and fiction. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment. Since 2008 Tim has produced a series of text works in the context of Forest Fringe as subversive posters and pamphlets, exploring performative approaches to language and creating a set of virtual events — darkly comical performances, debates, fights and other spectacles which are summoned or created in text alone.
*Installation

BERLIN, NEVADA “Still Night”
How is it that you know of this city? It is only now i have dreamt of it… Still Night, inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, casts Yokohama as its main actor. The show begins as a lecture on the city, seen through the eyes of a foreigner, and delivered in a hybrid language. It is the city of Yokohama, but seen through a myriad of lenses, mixing real places with mythical perspectives until something shifts and the room disappears. Teetering between two worlds, Yokohama becomes more elusive until both lecturer and audience start to question which world is real. BERLIN, NEVADA is the collaboration between Gemma Brockis, a founder member of Shunt, and Silvia Mercuriali, a founder member of Rotozaza, Il Pixel Rosso and Inconvenient Spoof. Its mission is to view public spaces through a theatrical lens, creating works to fuse fiction and reality and complicate both.
*Performance in English with Japanese translation

Holly Rumble “One Minute Birdwatching” “Hear the pin drop here”
Holly Rumble is an artist working with sound and live public intervention. Her work aims to engage audiences in playful group activities to encourage exploration of specific locations. She has performed at ANTI Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio, Finland), SPILL National Platform (London, UK), FIRSTS (Royal Opera House 2, London, UK), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (UK), and PULSE Fringe Festival (Ipswich, UK). She is also the co-founder of Other/Other/Other, a collective for artists making site-specific live art.
*“One Minute Birdwatching”: performed in English
*“Hear the pin drop here”: performed in English and Japanese

plan b “A Day in the Life, the Walkers of Birmingham”
plan b are the artists Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers. They make performance work, durational work, participatory projects, locative media and audio projects and exhibit the outcomes of their data collection activities (including our GPS traces over a number of years). A Day in the Life, the Walkers of Birmingham, is a plan b project giving the people of Birmingham a chance to see their city as a moving, growing network of lines made by the people who move through its streets, parks, tow paths and waste grounds.
*Installation

Creative Lab
Japanese and British artists-in-residence in Yokohama develop the city with a new approach. The ideas and creation processes of the artists will be broadcast interactively.

Ella Good and Nicki Kent
Ella Good and Nicki Kent are Bristol based live artists. They are members of artist-led community Residence. Their practice is centered around conversation, intimacy and participation. They tend to present performance with a conversational style, relying on the relationship between them as a duo to create an atmosphere of togetherness and partnership, where generous audience participation feels possible. They are often concerned with finding ways to communicate bigger concepts and contexts through smaller, more delicate, personal detail and truth – to explore the relationship between the epic and the personal, the juxtaposition of the mundane and the sublime that exists simultaneously in our lives.

Richard DeDomenici
Richard DeDomenici makes use of conceptual art tactics in combination with an irreverent pop sensibility to critique and intervene in public behaviour and rhetoric. His work disturbs perceptions through humour and confrontation outside of normal spaces. DeDomenici weaves unexpected connections between different states of ideas, happenstance and current affairs all around the world. In 2011 he performed in Tokyo, New York, Amsterdam and Berlin. He was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Fellowship, nominated for the Jerwood Trust Moving Image Prize, and was an Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award finalist. Embarrassingly he lost all three. His 2012 show is called Popaganda.

Deborah Pearson
Deborah Pearson is best known as founder and co-director of artist led Edinburgh initiative Forest Fringe, winner of two Herald Angels, a Peter Brook Empty Space Award as well as a Fringe First and a spot for herself and her co-director in 2009 on the Stage 100 list. In her own practice she works predominantly as a writer and solo performer. She most recently wrote the libretto for a site specific opera at the Gladstone Hotel with Volcano Productions, and created an immersive audio dance piece called “The Queen West Project” with choreographer Allison Cummings and street youth from Eva’s Phoenix, both in Toronto, Canada. Her work is often preoccupied with the strangeness of being conscious and in March she collaborated with novelist and neuropsychologist Paul Broks on an audio piece about the brain for Fuel’s bodypods series. She has made intimate work for Rules and Regs, BAC’s one-on-one festival, Latitude, the Arches and Shunt.

Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury is a live artist based in London and Beirut. She creates immersive and challenging performances in which the audience is an active collaborator. Tania has performed in spaces ranging from the British Museum to a cable car and an old church once used as a military base during the Lebanese civil war. Her solo work has toured several international festivals. She is co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a collective using urban research and live art in order to reclaim public space.

©Reiji Saito

Shun Sasa
Born in 1986 in Miyagi, Japan. Based in Tokyo. Sasa utilizes complex layers of sound, structure, and text in his installation work to create a site where audience can feel and be a part of a world of overlapping fiction, reality, and distinct space-time, creating fictitious moments that may come true in the future. One of his recent works, The Desk and The Monitor, looks at the possibilities of the wood from the desk being made into other objects, such as a violin, a baseball bat, or a spectacle frame.

Mihoko Watanabe
Born in 1987. Founder of the Watanabe Mihoko Company. Graduated the School of Theatre’s production course at the College of Art, Nihon University, in 2010 and joined the production section of the Seinendan theatre company in the same year. Watanabe established “Nijyu-nikai” with fellow artist and performer Mai Endo in 2013. By the use of drama in which humans look at other humans, Watanabe’s productions explore why humans are perceived as humans and the phenomena that accompany this perception. Her style of performance is characterized by the closeness between the performer and the audience to whom she often reaches out. Watanabe depicts what is not present while being present.